In Retrospect: Back to Virgin Land

Before I sat down to write this review, I called Harvard University Press to find out how many copies of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth had recently sold. The paperback of Virgin Land is still in print, but no one has ordered a copy from the press in the last two years. Some copies certainly sit on bookstore shelves, but Smith’s book is not what it once was: the mainstay of graduate seminars in American Studies or in the history of the American West.

Like those of you who went through interdisciplinary graduate programs in the late 1970s, I enrolled in courses in which we read Virgin Land and books by various writers who had been lumped together as adherents of the “myth-and-symbol” school. We dismissed them all. We noted their oversights, their lack of theoretical rigor, their simple confidence that the varied experiences of past actors could be captured by a single unifying myth, and their inattention to the necessary facts of the past. We wrote essays, using the phrase “myth and symbol” as shorthand for a collection of errors we resolved never to commit.

For those of us in American Studies who had to face colleagues in English departments armed with the tools of poststructuralism and friends in History departments armed with the political and intellectual rectitude of social history, myth and symbol was our quiet shame. It was all we had of theory and method, and it was of little worth. It was especially shameful for those who happened to be in American Studies and interested in the history of the American West. Nevertheless the passion with which we addressed Virgin Land suggests the currency it once had.

It has been interesting to return to the books on myths and symbols, especially Virgin Land, without a predisposition to scorn. After all, in 1950, when it first appeared, Smith’s academic colleagues and their students greeted it with acclaim. It promised to unite a fractured academy by crossing disciplines. It promised to open whole new areas for study, to invigorate literary criticism with history, and enrich economic and political history by attending to the symbolic aspects of the human imagination. One of Smith’s students, Barry Marks, recognized that the achievement of Virgin Land lay in the way it “welded together the imagistic concerns of literary critics, the focus on folk tales, songs, and mythology of cultural anthropologists, and the emphasis on perception of psychologists and sociologists.” ¹ Virgin Land, a book written by a professor of English, captured the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association and the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.

For a few years, Virgin Land pleased its constituencies in literature and in history, and the book still appears in the intellectual genealogies of American Studies and in bibliographies on the historiography of the American West. ² Scholars in both fields have long since abandoned the kind of work Smith proposed, but rereading Virgin Land takes us back to the two disciplines and to the academy in the early 1950s. For all the book’s flaws, Smith saw several things clearly when he wrote Virgin Land. He recognized that the symbolic dimensions of politics were often as important as what passed for hard-headed realism. Beginning to explore the cultural dimension of politics, Smith also noticed the political dimensions of culture and asked readers to acknowledge the tensions in American literature between the conventions of genre and the peculiar social experience that was the United States. By reading widely in the literature of westward expansion, Smith also laid out the sources for the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner and offered an explanation for Turner’s odd longevity.

Virgin Land was based on the dissertation Henry Nash Smith wrote for Harvard’s Program in American Civilization. Smith was born in Dallas in 1906 and went east for the first time to study English in graduate school at Harvard in 1926. He left after a year with a master’s degree and returned to Texas to teach at Southern Methodist University and to...